Titles of group exhibitions are often either forced or nondescript. “Well-Tempered,” by contrast, is one of the more informative titles of a multi-artist show in recent memory. It suits all four painters with finely tuned styles.

All have been on view before at R.B. Stevenson Gallery more than once. But the works in this show are new to the space.

Polished style and close attention to the painting surface has been a common thread among most of the artists Ron Stevenson has exhibited through the years. The quartet of widely exhibited artists on view fit that description, too, though each quite differently.

In fact, attention to surface can be extremely different things. Michael Reafsnyder’s paintings are explosions of color while Judith Foosaner’s are positively restrained.

Reafsnyder, who lives and works in Orange, has gotten a lot of acclaim in Los Angeles; his compositions pack a wallop. “Buoyant” lives up to its name, with its thick and thin ribbons, sweep and drops of color, in a host of hues. It even downplays the jokey device that undermines many of his paintings: a smiley face done in the same painterly style as his pictures.

For Foosaner, a Bay Area artist, form trumps color. She limits herself to black, white and gray in three canvases on view. The shapes are botanical in “Rainmaker’s Daughter,” both rounded and silky. In “Secular Movement,” she takes similar forms and divides them along straight lines, creating traces of a grid here and there. They are handsome and tasteful. You feel as if she has settled into a kind of visual groove, which flirts with formula but is saved by the vigor of her drawing.

Color is refined to a dazzling degree in Jimi Gleason’s paintings, and so are his surfaces. Where Reafsnyder favors paint as thick as frosting on a cake, Gleason makes his smooth. His blue seems as deep as that of the sky in “Curve Ball,” whose only overt connection to baseball is its diamond shape. Gleason, who lives and works in Los Angeles, creates this depth of color by applying multiple layers with a variety of tools. His surfaces shimmer, and the diamond contour creates a tantalizing tension with its shape: It looks as if he’s cut out a slice of blue sky. But the color shifts at the edges, reminding you that any resemblance to nature is an illusion — a visual curveball. His two other paintings leave the natural landscape behind. “Fast Ball” is intricately patterned with crisscrossing lines, while “Slider” is thick with swirls. Both are seductive.

Thomas Zitzwitz, who lives and works in Germany, is as virtuosic with paint as Gleason and just as devoted to a finished surface. But he views paintings as kind of visual theater. In “Atomic,” the expanse of vertical lines gently evokes a curtain, and if you squint your eyes, you see the semblance of figures and landscape behind it. In “Old Rembrandt,” there’s a hint of something behind its rippled surface of blue, green, violet and magenta. But what is lurking there looks as hazy as swirls of light. Both paintings are theaters of mystery, which come to life because his control of color and light is impressive.